Wildlife

Straw-coloured fruit bat

Straw-coloured fruit bats are the most widely distributed of the African fruit bats and live and travel in vast colonies numbering into the millions. They roost in tall trees, and go off in smaller foraging groups at night searching for ripe fruits. After noisily sucking out the juice from a fruit, they discard the pulp, which makes them important pollinators and seed dispersers. They also chew wood and bark to obtain moisture.

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Life

A swamp in Zambia houses the biggest bat roost in the world.

Thought bats were anti-social creatures that only came out at Halloween? Then think again. Every year, hundreds of thousands of straw-coloured fruit bats leave the Congolese forest and fly over a thousand kilometres to Kasanka National Park, a remote swamp in neighbouring Zambia. Here they join the largest gathering of fruit bats in the world.